[WIP] Sprint 39 Blog Post Draft

[lslezak]

Sprint 39 Blog Post Draft

• This is just a draft for collecting the text for the team blog.
• Whenever you finish something worth mentioning at the blog just add a new comment
• The text will be reviewed and polished before publishing, this is just to collect
  the input from the developers. So be focused on the technical side, the wording,
  grammar, etc... can be improved later 😉

Thank you for your contribution! 👍

[jreidinger]

Auto-submission Improvement

YaST team use as much automatization as possible. For release often patter we use packaging_rake_tasks and we found one problem when developing new product. If package is missing in target project where we want to create submit request, it will fail with 404 error from osc. We use package in target repo to recognize if version changed in devel project and if so, then we create submit request. But obviously when it stop after failure no submit request is created.

Currently so much package is affected, then we overdue our laziness and fix it in upstream, so everyone can benefit from it. The changed behavior is that when package is missing in target project, it will always create submit request and check for increased version is skipped.

[jreidinger]

Ruby 2.4 Support

World is changing and we adapting YaST to be a shiny pearl even in the new World. One of changes is new ruby 2.4 that is going to hit openSUSE Tumbleweed and SUSE Linux Enterprise 15. There is some failing packages with new ruby and many technical details we need to deal with, but at the end, YaST still shining with new ruby, so this story have happy ending.

@ancorgs do you want more details like that Integer, YaML loading problems, ERB scoping or that stuff with backward compatible builtins?

[jreidinger]

Droping of YaST2 Add-on and Product Creator

Number of bugs, new features and various feedback still growing and there are parts of YaST2 where we focus. And then there are parts that does not have so much focus, it does not evolve much and there are new bugs and noone is interested in old ones.. Then we have two options. The first one is to change priorities and focus to that parts to make it shining, but others where we currently focus will suffer from it. The second is to evaluate if these parts still brings enough value and if it make sense to have it as part of YaST when it does not shiny enough as our standard packages.

And now we have to announce that the second options happen to YaST add-on and product creator modules. It is packages that use as backend kiwi and we have high competition on UI sides - SUSE Studio and Open Build Service. So it do no longer make sense to have there packages and we recommend if you are user of these modules to use one of alternatives or kiwi directly, if you already have xml definition file for kiwi.

[jreidinger]

More Products on One Medium

It does not happen in openSUSE, but for SUSE Linux Enterprise there are more products and currently each product installation require own medium. So if you use Server, Desktop and Server for SAP, you have to have three DVDs to install it, which is a bit uncomfortable. We now discussion how to have more products on single media and we create first prototype of it. The idea is that there is one more dialog that allows to select given product almost at the start of installation and then continue with work-flow for given product. It is still proof of concept, but we can at least share screenshots with you how it will look like:

[gilsonsouza]

Adapting YaST to accept 12 digits Service Request Number

As Service Request Numbers are no longer composed of only 11 digits, but they can also be 12 digits, we had to adapt YaST to handle this change. YaST module Support can now accept 11 or 12 digit service request numbers. We implemented such a change for all products dating back from SLE 10 SP3 until the most recent SUSE Linux versions. Updates with this change will be soon released.

[mvidner]

Network Setup in the 1st Stage of Autoinstallation

The YaST installation used to have two stages, separated by a reboot. Starting with SLE 12 and openSUSE Leap 42.1 we have eliminated the second stage. But it was still needed for AutoYaST, controlled by the setting

<profile><general><mode><second_stage>true | false</...>

We have now fixed those parts of the networking setup that still needed the second stage.

(yast2-network-3.3.3, PR#520 yast/yast-network#520)

[schubi2]

User settings in AutoYaST

We have found out, that GDM has problems with system users who have the same UIDs. Then GDM wil not be started properly. So either UIDs will be defined in the AutoYaST configuration file for ALL Users or this tag will not be used at all for ALL users. I mixture can result into unique UIDs.

[mchf]

I'd like to highlight that Network Setup in the 1st Stage of Autoinstallation works in 1st stage only if the second stage is explicitly disabled. That was not clear from @mvidner's post.

[gilsonsouza]

@mchf : I updated the blog post to add that it needs to be explicitly disabled.

[lslezak]

Closing, thank you!